The Skinny House that Almost Flew

Tiny houses are a big topic, right now. A lot of people are intrigued by the thought of being able to fry something on the stove with one foot in the bathtub. For some, it’s all about simplification: If you’ve got ninety-nine problems in a two thousand square foot house, you’ll only have ten in a two hundred square foot house… except for that issue with commitment… that’ll follow you around no matter where you live. Your problems will be different. In a larger house, you’ll have issues like decorating and space flow; in a tiny house, you’ll have issues like how to spend the five volts from the solar panels or could you find a place to empty the chemical toilet where no one will see you. There are people who will pump out your toilet for free, but those are not people that you want anywhere near you or your tiny house.

I, on the other hand, am fascinated by the concept of the “skinny house”… a structure where all the rooms are in a line and can be knocked over by a seven year-old. Another term for that is “single-wide trailer”. From what I understand, a single-wide trailer is the biggest motivator for people to move to homes that are not single-wide trailers… so they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.

Unless something goes horribly wrong, a trailer sits about three feet above the ground; which is enough space for a two year-old horse to roll under, we found out. Oh, and when that does happen and your dad crawls under to get the horse out, he’s going to end up at the emergency room… minus his big toenail, apparently. Took twenty years for it to grow back.

Because they are covered in metal, trailers make swell lightning rods… although I think a building acting as its own lightning rod nullifies the benefits of having a lightning rod. We’d get hit directly by lightning about three times a year… so often we hardly even noticed. Our trailer’s anchoring hurricane ties grounded our trailer and offered tipping protection in the unlikely event of a tornado. And, like most unlikely events, that happened to us. We were fine, though, and our trailer wasn’t thrown so far that we couldn’t find it the next day…

My father was transferred to a Naval base near Memphis so we sold the trailer to someone who quickly burned it to ashes. That was the way of rural Florida at the time and who are we to judge? And, we were finally going to move into a real house… military housing… brick row houses… two-dimensional floor plans… with hot and cold running cockroaches. But, there was a wait of about six weeks. So, we had to find someplace to live during that time. My parents quickly found something affordable that would hold us all.

A single-wide trailer…